Studies Break Down Abortion Rate

3% In U.s. Have Operation

Protestants, Jews Least Likely

October 07, 1988|By New York Times News Service.

Two nationwide surveys indicate that young, poor, black unmarried women are most likely to have abortions, but that the operation is common among women of all racial and economic groups, even among women who belong to religious groups opposing abortions.

They show that nearly 3 of every 100 American women 15 to 44 years old had an abortion last year, a figure that has remained constant for a decade.

The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a private foundation in New York that studies family planning issues, conducted the surveys.

One involved nearly 10,000 women who had abortions at 103 clinics, doctors` offices and hospitals in 1987. The other involved 1,900 women who had abortions at 30 other medical centers.

The surveys provide the most complete information yet on abortions among Hispanic women, said Jeannie Rosoff, president of the Guttmacher Institute.

The abortion rate among Hispanic women was 4.3 per 100, while the rate among non-Hispanic white women was 2.3 per 100.

The highest rate for any group, nonwhite women, most of whom were black, was 5.3 per 100.

Women gave various reasons for aborting, and most women gave more than one reason.

A majority said that a baby would interfere with their work or schooling or that they could not afford to have a baby.

Women who said they were Roman Catholics had an abortion rate that was about the same as the American average of 3 per 100. Catholic women tended to say that they were having an abortion because they did not want anyone to know they had become pregnant.

The rates among women who described themselves as Protestant or Jewish were 30 percent below the national average.

Only half the women in the survey were using contraceptives in the month they conceived, although 91 percent said they had used contraceptives at some time.

Among the women not using contraceptives, three-quarters had recently used birth control pills, but had stopped from one to three months before they became pregnant.

Stanley K. Henshaw and Jane Silverman, researchers at the Guttmacher Institute, speculated that many women mistakenly believe that they are protected from becoming pregnant for several months after they stop taking birth control pills.

Henshaw and Silverman also noted that the women who said they became pregnant while using contraceptives, ``most likely used their method improperly and inconsistently.``

They added that the data show that making contraceptives available may not be enough to prevent women from having unplanned and unwanted pregnancies. ``The data examined here present compelling evidence of the problems women have in using even the most effective methods,`` the researchers wrote. ``You do have sort of a conundrum here,`` Rosoff said. ``Virtually everybody in the country says that they`re using contraceptives, except half of all pregnancies are unintended and half of those end in abortion. People have a standard in their heads that they should use contraceptives, but if they use them, they don`t use them well enough or they don`t use them at the proper moment.``

The survey questionnaire also asked women who had abortions after their first trimester of pregnancy why they waited. These abortions are physically and emotionally more difficult, yet about 10 percent of abortions are performed after 16 weeks of gestation, Rosoff said.

Seventy-one percent of the women having late abortions said that they did not know they were pregnant or had misjudged how long they had been pregnant. Half of the women said, for example, that they had no signs of pregnancy and half said they had been hoping that they were not pregnant thoughout the first trimester of their pregnancy.